


intersection and divergence

by cygnes



Category: True Detective
Genre: Alcoholism, Depression, F/M, Infidelity, M/M, Mentions of Sexual Assault, Multi, Victim-blaming, implied institutional homophobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-15
Updated: 2014-03-15
Packaged: 2018-01-15 19:54:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1317292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/cygnes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. It's not so much a matter of things going wrong as it is a matter of things going differently. </p>
<p>(In Alaska, Rust speculates about what might have been.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	intersection and divergence

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted a few days ago on [tumblr](http://manzanas-amargas.tumblr.com/post/79326138152/fic-intersection-and-divergence).

It’s mornings like this, when the cold stops the breath in his chest as soon as he gets out of bed, that Rust gets to thinking about where else he might be. He knows better than to believe in second chances. He doesn’t hope to do things differently next time around.

There are versions of his life where he’s ten years dead and buried in an unmarked shallow grave near the Mexican border. Those versions aren’t all that different from where he is now, in some ways. There are versions of his life where he’s still got Sophia and Claire and a white picket fence. He’s spent long enough thinking about those, since before his perspective on life really coalesced, to know how little good it will do to imagine himself happy.

There are plenty of versions of his life where he’s still down in Louisiana, and those are the ones he thinks about the most. They’ve diverged most recently. It’s only natural.

He could be alone in his almost-bare apartment. Maybe reading, probably obsessing. This possibility does not interest him.

He could be with someone in his apartment. If it lasted long enough, maybe the rooms wouldn’t be so empty.

 

—

 

"You ever think of painting this place?" Marty says. He’s sitting in a lawn chair indoors and frowning ponderously. "You’ve been here—what, seven years? And it doesn’t even look like you’ve moved in."

"I have a table now," Rust says. "I even had a couch for a while."

"What happened to it?"

"Sold it. I didn’t need it." He doesn’t say that he bought it when he had a girlfriend because she had been appalled by his lack of furniture. The need for a couch (for a television, for a bedframe, for a well-stocked refrigerator) had been predicated entirely on her frequent visits. Marty’s the only one who comes by now, and he isn’t all that bothered by the emptiness, no matter what he says. Rust can tell.

"Yeah, well, this place looks like a goddamn prison cell," Marty grouses. "Or a mental hospital. Institutional."

"You can stay somewhere else if it bothers you that much."

He won’t, of course. Marty’s still pretending that Maggie might take him back, and finding his own place would make that illusion harder to maintain.

(It will take another week and a half of prickly cohabitation before they cross over into new and unfamiliar territory: an inexpert handjob made intimate by the desperate loneliness they reflect back at one another.

(“I hope you’re prepared to take responsibility for sullying my virtue,” Rust will say, perfectly deadpan.

(“Fuck you,” Marty will say, laughing. And they’ll get around to that, too, by the time the week is out.

(They’ll have almost a month before everything falls apart and Marty learns what Rust’s apartment looks like when it’s really honest-to-god empty.)

 

—

 

or maybe

 

—

 

"Christ, I need to get home," Maggie says, glancing at her watch and grabbing her coat from where she tossed it on the kitchen counter.

(This version of Maggie didn’t wait until Rust was just a tool to use against Marty, to deprive him of two people he considered his. This version of Maggie didn’t wait until Rust was falling-down drunk because she knew he’d refuse her if he was sober. In this sequence of events, things between them started earlier, mostly because Rust was covetous of the home that Marty didn’t appreciate and Maggie liked to be appreciated.)

Maggie has made a note of Marty’s pattern of late nights, and those sometimes become her and Rust’s late nights, too. She still spends more time at home, more time with the girls, than Marty. Hell, Rust probably spends more time with Maisie and Audrey than Marty does these days.

But they’ve made sure to keep boundaries there. They don’t do anything intimate in the Hart household. They sure as hell never fuck in Maggie and Marty’s marriage bed.

Which is why she’s in Rust’s apartment—the only reason she’s ever in Rust’s apartment. She never thinks to ask him to decorate because she never really looks around.

"Of course," Rust says. There’s no venom in the words, but Maggie must hear something there other than his fatigue, because she turns back to him in frustration.

"Not now, Rust. Not tonight." It’s never the right time to talk about how they aren’t happy—about how being together to avoid feeling alone isn’t a solution for anyone. Rust lets her leave without another word.

(In a week or a month or three months, Audrey will tell her father about her suspicions just so that he’ll be angry at someone else for a change. It works. This is another version of events that ends with his apartment empty, even if it takes a little longer.)

 

—

 

And there is a parallel version where it was Rust instead of Beth who was Marty’s dirty little secret the second time he strayed; a version where Marty remembered Rust’s comment about a down payment years back and it made him just uncomfortable enough to let her go home alone. Not uncomfortable enough to keep him from scratching that itch with someone else, though. Someone who knows him better, and who knows that using the relationship to ruin Marty would ruin him, too.

It takes Maggie a little longer to find out, but not much. She still finds him in a moment of weakness and exploits that vulnerability. He still lets her. She still tells Marty. There’s still a fight, and Rust still quits.

This ends the same way, bringing him to Alaska, at this very moment. There may be different nuances to the way the Harts hate him, but it’s all the same to Rust.

He thinks about this version of events while he takes a pair of sewing scissors to his hair. Rust doesn’t own a mirror, but he can tell when it stops falling into his eyes, and that’s what counts. He’s considered letting it grow until he can pull it back, but maintaining hair like that takes longer than he currently has the patience for.

Rust still doesn’t sleep much. Sometimes he’ll drink himself into unconsciousness, but that’s not that same thing.

He dreams of equilibrium and is disappointed when he comes back to himself.

 

—

 

It wouldn’t be right, and it wouldn’t be fair, but there ought to be a version of events somewhere that balances.

 

—

 

Rust wakes up alone in his almost-bare apartment. It’s not right to think of himself as a demimonde—he’s a man of vices, but not decadence. And if he’s half the world to two people, that adds up to a whole, doesn’t it? At least if those two people are half the world to each other.

The relationships necessitate distance, discretion. Marty and Maggie have a certain idea of what it is to be respectable, and he isn’t part of that. He’s part of them, now, though. There’s no getting around it.

(Maybe it started with a certain deliberate cant of his hips in the locker room instead of a threat. Maybe it started with a gentle close-mouthed kiss after he mowed a lawn. Maybe, maybe, maybe.)

 

—

 

Rust wakes up alone.

He has nothing and no one but the cold that seeps under his skin and a spiderweb of what-if and never-will-be.

No—that’s not right.

Rust has one thing.

He has unfinished business.


End file.
